Chertsey Court is a large purpose-built complex of apartments erected in the 1930s. It is bordered by the Lower Richmond Road to the south and Clifford Avenue to the west.
The first detailed record of the area is the tithe map of 1837. The western part of the area was owned by General Popham (shown in blue) and the eastern part by Thomas Fitzgerald (shown in yellow). The fields owned by Popham were worked as market gardens – plot 72 was farmed by Thomas Pocock and plot 74 by William Attwood.
Snake Alley divided the two plots. Snake Alley was closed/stopped up in 1841 at the request of Thomas Fitzgerald who said “it afforded a lurking place and place of concealment for depredators and petty thieves”. In the winter Snake Alley was full of mud, and the alley was said to be used by river thieves who ran their goods ashore at the Ship Lane draw dock and took them via Snake Alley towards Richmond.
The sinister reputation attached to Snake Alley persisted into the 20th century. A few yards from the hawthorn hedge dividing the field from the Lower Richmond Road there was a little copse of dense bushes, once a pond. Timid persons would hurry past this spot after dark as it was held to have unpleasant associations. As late as the 1930s it was said a gipsy chief was buried there, or someone taken out of the river to secure the ground for a cemetery.
In 1969 an exorcism took place to rid one of the flats of a ghost or poltergeist. So look out for the gipsy chief!
Plot 77 on the tithe map was pastureland managed by John Williams who probably gave his name to Williams Lane. Watney’s Brewery bought much of Fitzgerald’s land shown on the map in the early 20th century and built Watney Road on plot 77. A scheme to relieve congestion in the southwest approach to London, was approved in 1927. It involved a major new road, the Great Chertsey Road, and the building of new bridges at Kew, Hampton and Chiswick. All three bridges were opened by Edward Prince of Wales on 3 July 1933. They were in addition to the now closed Hammersmith Bridge, which had first been built in 1825.
Chertsey Court was built by the Borough of Barnes in the triangle to the southeast of the new road at a cost of £92,000 and was opened in May 1938. The land had previously been earmarked for a bus garage. Most of the first residents of Chertsey Court were families re-housed from Hampton Square, now an alley off Sheen Lane, which by the 1930s was regarded as unsuitable for habitation.
Sources on Snake Alley
Rambles of Old Wagram (1909) John Eustace Anderson
Alleyways of Mortlake and East Sheen (1983) Charles Hailstone, published Barnes and Mortlake History Society
